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Tuesday, March 17, 2009

On St. Patrick's Day Everyone is Irish

It's March 17th again, so it's time to pay a tribute to my great-grandfather, Barnet "Barney" Newmark. My Hebrew name, בָּרוּ (Baruch), was in his honor. He celebrated his birthday on March 17th, and claimed to have been born in Dublin, Ireland. However, the Newmark family actually came from Warka, Poland (37 miles south of Warsaw.) It was only a minor fib, as this map illustrates.

In a way, I owe my recent obsession with genealogy to my great grandfather's fib. It made for a fun story to tell my friends on the holiday, and one of those friends was also obsessed with genealogy, so he conducted a search, and sent me a link to the 1920 HeritageQuest census for my great grandfather. Once I realized what was available online, there was no turning back. That was two years ago, in April of 2007.

[This map, courtesy of Google, contains the origin of most of my ancestors. In the upper right is Kaunas, Lithuania, about 24 miles from Kruvandai, the origin of my Cruvant ancestors. The rest of my paternal ancestors came from Poland. In the lower right is Cluj, Romania, which is 25 miles from Varalmas, Romania, where my maternal grandfather was born. I believe the rest of my (non-Native American) maternal ancestors originated in England, the Netherlands, Germany, or the Alsace region in France.]

1 comment:

Came to your blog from the St. Louis Bloggers Guild website. Your title alone brought back memories of being in Ireland.

1. Irish people tend to make fun of Americans stating that "Every American claims to be Irish"

2. The first time I was there I stayed for a few weeks at a hostel with a friend. At the time we were living in Colorado. The little man at the front desk banged on the door (not once but three separate times) in the middle of the night to announce that we had new guests from Colorado and perhaps we might know them. Apparently he didn't realize that our state was practically the size of his whole country and the chance of us knowing them was next to impossible.